He heard the whispering shift of the canvas flap, and his eyes opened a slit. An ominous figure was standing in the doorway, one moment in uniform, the next in a carapace of armoured, ridged skin like a dinosaur. Benya gasped in fright, but the nurse had turned. She evidently knew the man in the black shirt.
‘Buonasera, Console Malamore.’
Malamore circled the bed, looking at Benya, inspecting the dressings on his wounds. Benya lay still.
‘You did this yourself?’ said Malamore, boots creaking.
‘Si, signore.’
‘Impressive.’
‘For a woman, you mean?’ she said, raising her chin in a defiant way.
‘Killing things is easier, that’s all.’
‘That I can see,’ she replied. ‘No one finds that a problem out here.’
He took out a cigarette and struck a match.
‘Not in here, consul’ – and she blew it out. Benya almost laughed out loud with surprise and approval.
‘Strict, eh?’
‘You’re not the first to say that. This is a medical facility.’
‘It’s a tent in a damned Russian village, that’s what it is,’ Malamore rasped.
‘Well, in here, I do as I wish,’ she said.
‘Some men wouldn’t take kindly to that…’ Malamore said.
If this was his attempt at flirting, thought Benya, the old crocodile needs some lessons.
‘How do you put a woman in her place, consul? Ippolito’s way?’
Benya wondered who Ippolito was – her husband? It sounded as if he was violent. He felt protective suddenly of this nurse with the braided hair.
‘God bless his memory,’ Malamore said, ‘but I guess his way didn’t get him anywhere, did it?’
The nurse crossed herself. He is dead, thought Benya. Thank goodness!
‘He didn’t suffer. You know I saw him. It was a single shot. Just plain bad luck.’ Malamore coughed. ‘I must go,’ he said but at the flap he turned back. ‘This is for you.’ He put a bottle of wine on the table. ‘It’s Russian stuff from the Crimea. Massandra. I’m not good with words… but only a strong woman… can do this.’ He gestured towards Benya. ‘Well, my mother was an able woman. She could do something like this. She and you.’
The canvas flapped shut.
Fabiana dropped into her chair with a sigh.
‘Sti cazzi!’ exclaimed Benya. His temperature was still dangerously high, and it came out louder than he’d intended.
‘What did you say?’ said the nurse, sounding shocked.
‘Sti cazzi! Porca puttana!’
‘That’s vile language.’ She looked at him very strictly, her black eyebrows lowered, but Benya found he was smiling a little, and then so was she. It was the first time Benya had laughed for ages.
‘You can swear in Italian too? Not bad but how do you even know that? Don’t use Roman swear words with me: I am a Venetian. How long have you been awake?’
‘A while,’ said Benya. He was shivering again but quite lucid.
‘So you heard all that?’
He nodded weakly. ‘It was painful.’
‘Your wounds, you mean?’
‘No, hearing that old crocodile flirt with you… Are you tempted?’
‘How about you mind your own problems?’
‘Am I an impertinent patient?’
‘The worst so far.’
‘I’m just a curioso,’ he said. He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know your name?’
‘Nurse Bacigalupe,’ she said cooly. ‘Are you thirsty?’ She gave him water. ‘Hungry?’
‘Very. What do we have? Carciofi alla romana? Fiori di zucca fritti? Spaghetti all’arrabbiata?’
‘You know some Italian? Maybe you’ve even been there?’
He nodded.
‘Stop showing off now. You need to rest or I’ll have to leave.’
‘What? And send back that crocodile to finish me off? What about the food? Is that ever coming?’
Smiling and shaking her head, she brought him bread, cheese and tomatoes, cutting them up for him. She watched him eat: he so enjoyed it, he sighed and almost mewed aloud.
‘This is as good a meal as I’ve ever had in my entire life,’ he said when he finished.
‘You’ve had a hard time.’
‘You too,’ he said, quoting: ‘“I’m a widow. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing.”’
‘Cosa? How did you…’
‘You may not have been aware of it, but you’ve been talking to yourself. I heard it. I was awake.’
He had that high after surgery, before the anaesthetic wears off and the pain kicks in.
‘You were beaten,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘What happened?’
But he’d fallen back into unconsciousness, swooping through a confusion of images, all terrible, all overwhelmingly immediate, everything that he had forgotten, or had tried to. How he’d been sentenced to death, then the gold mines, the Splitter in the cavalry charge, the hands he’d seen reaching out of the earth, Melishko trapped under Elephant, Tonya and the shod man, the child and Dr Kapto. He was talking wildly in Russian and Fabiana understood phrases of it, and she went to him and stroked his forehead, calming, speaking softly to him, wiping the sweat that poured from him. Suddenly he started to weep, and she sat and held his hand until, as the sun rose higher in the sky and the heat became intense, he fell asleep.
She leaned over him. ‘Are you actually asleep now?’ she whispered tenderly. There was no reply. ‘I thought so.’
III
It was early evening and Klimov, Svetlana’s bodyguard, sat nervously in the hall of the apartment in the House on the Embankment just across the Moskva from the Kremlin. He was nervous because he could not see his charge. He smoked and listened; he was so fond of Svetlana. Her life was hard; she had lost her mother, and as for her father, well, he had other duties – so he, Klimov, did not want to spoil her fun. Surely a girl could go on a date? But she was his responsibility and he had to answer to Stalin who was not just the Tsar but also a Georgian father. He looked at his watch and became even more uneasy. She had been in the apartment for almost an hour. What was he to do?
Svetlana was in the kitchen with Lev Shapiro. The table was between them but they stared at each other across the spread of zakuski, salted fish and little vodka glasses. At first they said little. He was in uniform; she wore a floral dress. It was a hot summer’s evening in Moscow and she was so anxious that her palms were wet and she worried about the sweat under her arms: God forbid if it showed!
Lev Shapiro leaned across to her and took both of her hands in his big ones. ‘I’m so glad we could see each other,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t easy,’ she said.
‘Nothing priceless is easy,’ he replied. ‘And nothing easy is priceless.’
‘You leave tomorrow?’
‘Yes. To Stalingrad – before dawn. I have to be there…’ and he started to talk in a stream about ideas and projects, articles, journeys, scripts, impressions, which Svetlana found quite intoxicating. Wait, she wanted to ask about the script – was that a film or a play, and which newspaper was that article for, and what did Ehrenburg say to Grossman about whom?